Our aim is to understand what interactions between living cells and extracellular matrix (ECM) components are crucial for successful cell culture. For this purpose we use direct force measurements between living cells and various ECM materials. Knowing these mechanisms better could help us to create improved tissue models for regenerative medicine and drug testing. It is known that stem cells respond to the physical and chemical properties of culturing matrices, but so far little is known about the underlying mechanisms and its outcomes in stem cell behavior. The studied cells were human pluripotent stem cells (line WA07). This cell line has the ability to differentiate into all kinds of cells found in the body, but it is very delicate and challenging to culture and has not been studied with AFM before. For comparison, more robust human hepatocarcinoma cells (HepG2) were also probed. The cells were cultured on the substrate and the biomaterials were coated on silica probes that were used attached to tipless AFM cantilevers and used as colloidal probes (Figure 1). The studied biomaterials were cellulose nanofibirls (CNF), laminin, and collagen I and collagen IV. While collagen has been studied previously, with other cell types than here, cellulose nanofibirls are rather novel cell culturing materials. We also studied the difference between forces in the presence of living and dead cells to distinguish between specific interactions and interactions due to e.g. surface charge. The measured interactions correlated well with observations during cell culturing. The forces were dependent on the time the surfaces were kept in contact and obviously on the biomaterial. This study shows the applicability of colloidal probe microscopy to get a better understanding of the interactions between cells and various biomaterials. This knowledge is important for tissue engineering.

Probing forces between stem cells and biomaterials using colloidal probe microscopy

255th National Meeting (2018)

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